It's an update!

Enhancements or Detractions

Most businesses work hard for their customers.  We aim to make our clients happy with the products and services we provide. This means we sometimes make exceptions, work extra hours to meet deadlines or provide extra personal time and training. But overall, we try to be consistent in what we do and when we have to make a change to a policy or procedure, we let our clients know about it.

Google doesn’t seem to work that way.  We are amazed at how often tools, procedures and functionality just change without any notice.  Sometimes it’s for the better such as the Google Ad Preview Tool discussed in a previous blog post. But most of the time, the change provides less functionality and just makes us frustrated.  Within just the past few weeks, here are just a few of the different changes we’ve noticed:

Google AdWords – Geotargeting

If you have a local business you only want to show ads to a local audience. Google allows you to do this through targeted locations. This is done at the campaign level by choosing Settings/ Locations and Languages /Locations. Then you choose Edit and Show Map. At this point you will be able to choose all towns you wish to include in your area. This appears to be a great feature. However, you will only be able to choose towns that Google has deemed large enough, otherwise, Google Adwords will default to the county the town is located in. This really cuts down the flexibility of the product. If you are trying to target a certain specific towns, it will only work if the town is big enough.

Amazingly, the previous version allowed you various options of choosing the targeted area which were more specific and flexible. You could even draw a polygon and Google would do its best to show your ads in the area specified.

Google AdWords – IP Exclusion

If you discover someone who repeatedly clicks on your ads to come to your website, you can eliminate these wasteful clicks by blocking your ads from showing at their IP address. Figuring out how to exclude IPs in AdWords was never really simple or intuitive, but now it’s become even harder.

Previously to exclude an IP, you went to Tools and Analysis and an option would be presented to exclude IPs. Now, I have to hunt around to find it every time.

To exclude an IP:

• Click Networks
• Go to the bottom of the page, and click Exclusions
• Scroll to the bottom of the exclusions list, and click Manage IP address exclusions (advanced)
• Choose the campaign
• Type in the IP address you wish to exclude
• Click save

Google AdWords – Reporting

Monthly reporting in AdWords is always an interesting experience.  It seems that any reports you have done in the past may, or may not, be available the next time you try to run them. The past few months the reporting feature has totally changed.

We have a number of reports that we tend to run monthly for our clients. Any reports that were set up prior to the change are still running with no way to stop them (calling Google customer support is the next step we will try). Moreover, they have switched the columns and added some fields to reports which are not needed – but can’t be removed.

The keyword report no long contains the display network information. Though in some ways this makes sense, Google found a way to provide this information in the past few years, so why stop now?

As with most changes, we will figure out how to accomplish what we need or come up with a workaround. For instance, the display network field (in the keyword report) is created from one line in a search report.

To be sure, some of the updates Google makes are beneficial. In some ways, the biggest issue is the surprise of going to perform a function and having it changed without any advance notice or warning.

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Cindy Wilson

If you advertise using Google AdWords, you want to know where your ad will be positioned and how it looks on the search results page.  Typing your keyword into Google Search will allow you to do this. However there is a “cost” associated with this action, even when you don’t click on your ad.  If you look at the page showing your ad, you generate an impression for your ad. When impressions go up but the number of clicks doesn’t, it reduces your Click-Through-Rate (CTR). A reduced CTR negatively impacts your Quality Score, which can cause Google to raise your Cost Per Click. But if you click on your ad, in order to improve your CTR, then you will have to pay for that click.

As an advertiser, you also may want to see how your ads appear in different locations, such as other parts of the country, or even in a different country.

In either situation, the best way to see your ad is to use a free tool that Google provides; an online tool aptly named the Google Ad Preview Tool. This tool allows you to “search for your ad just like you would on a regular Google search results page, without accruing any impressions.”

The Ad Preview tool is very simple to use. For instance, if your keyword is ski poles and you sell them in the Denver, CO, area, then you type the keyword and the location. Below are screenshots of the search page and the results displayed.

Click here to access the tool.

Search Page

Results Page

For Google's eye only!

One of the most important things a Web Analytics tool can tell you is the keywords people are typing to find your website on the search engines. Lately, however, Google has been blocking significant portions of that data, ostensibly for privacy reasons.

To see what we mean, here’s an example of keywords as a traffic source. You can do this yourself in your own Web Analytics account. These instructions are for the new user interface in Google Analytics but instructions for the old user interface are also provided in parentheses, if appropriate.

• Log in to your account (and then click View Report).
• Select Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic (Select Traffic Sources > Keywords and then select “non-paid” just below the graph).
• Scan down the list of keywords that brought non-paid traffic to your website. You may need to expand past the first 10 that are shown by default. You are looking for a keyword called “not provided.”

In the actual example shown below, Organic Search brought 4,810 visits over a 30-day period. Of those 4,810 visits, the #1 keyword was “not provided” which brought 1,110 visits.

What is going on here? What does “not provided” mean?

It turns out that Google has stopped providing search keyword info for any users who are logged into their Google account. In other words, if you log into your Gmail or Google Docs account for example and then do a search, any website you click through to from the search engine will be blocked from seeing the keyword that you typed. You’ll show up in the “not provided” set of visitors, or, in some cases labeled as “not set.”

Why Is This Important?

Knowing which keywords brought your site traffic is one of the most important measurements of success for your organic SEO efforts. In addition, if you know which keywords contribute significantly to your traffic, you can and should “tune” your website to be more compelling and relevant for people who search on those keywords. Google has said for a long time that it rewards websites that are relevant for specific keywords with higher rankings for those keywords. By blinding website owners to a significant portion of traffic, Google has made it harder for website owners to tune their sites toward their primary audiences.

How Significant is the Problem?

Google stated that the affected traffic is “in the single digit percentages” but the example above, drawn from one of our actual clients, shows 23% of keyword data blocked. We are compiling data across a few dozen Web Analytics accounts and will post the results shortly, but our preliminary numbers are showing many sites being blinded on over 10% of their search traffic. Part of the issue is that Google doesn’t automatically time out. In some cases, even shutting down your browser and shutting down your PC doesn’t log you out – as soon as you boot back up and re-start your browser, you’re automatically logged back in.

Is the Problem Found Only in Google Analytics?

No, the problem is not specific to Google Analytics. Normally, search engines provide the typed keyword to the website when the visitor arrives. Other search engines still do. Only Google search doesn’t when the person is logged into their Google account. So it doesn’t matter whether you use Google Analytics or another Web Analytics tool – you’re still not going to see all of the search query data on Google searches.

Why Would Google Do This?

Google claims, in a recent blog post here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html that they are doing this to protect the privacy and security of their Search users. In practice, the identity of the searcher is not revealed so it’s unclear how this benefits anyone. Google now keeps data that it won’t share. Because the individual is logged into a Google account, it is Google that can associate the search keyword with an individual. If anyone should be getting locked out of this data to protect the user, it’s Google.

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Cindy Wilson

We recently received an email warning us about the new top level domain xxx, which will have general availability as of December, 2011. The email recommended that we hurry during the “Sunrise B” time period and register the xxx domain for our trademark so that others couldn’t use it.

Currently, you can register your domain name with a number of different extensions. The common ones in the US are .com, .org, .net, etc. Companies outside the US generally use the country abbreviation. As of December, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which regulates the internet’s naming system, is making available a new extension xxx for the adult entertainment industry. The time before the general availability has been named the Sunrise period where companies may protect their trademarks by choosing to reserve their name from being registered. This means that if we don’t reserve the domain name market-vantage.xxx, someone else may register it instead.

We have put together an evaluation to help you decide what is best for your company. Here are some specific points we looked at to determine an answer:

• Would someone trying to find your website type the xxx extension by mistake?If someone types a URL with an xxx extension, they are looking for adult content. There is virtually no chance that someone would type .xxx instead of .com by mistake.

• What are the costs associated with reserving an xxx extension of your domain name?If you are interested in reserving your trademark before December, the application fees are about $200-300, for 10 years, per registered trademark. ICANN anticipates the annual fees for registering xxx domains will be higher. Therefore, if you plan to reserve your domain for the xxx extension, you would be wise to do so before the December deadline.Here is a list of accredited domain registrars who can reserve your trademark.
• How much of an impact will this have for your organization? In other words, does it really matter if someone has this domain name?We believe that for most it probably doesn’t matter. But obviously, everyone will need to determine this for themselves.

Though we’re not proponents of this new extension being offered, one of the benefits we see is the ease with which businesses that don’t want their employees accessing adult content will be able to block them via their router.

Some of the sites we looked at for the research include icann.org, cyveillanceblog.com, icmregistry.com and womeninbusiness.about.com.

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Darryl Delong

In previous blog posts we’ve discussed the importance of website design and content on search. However, there are certain publishing platforms you can use to build and maintain your website, that come with SEO benefits. WordPress is one of those platforms. In addition to the fact that it is free open-source code, there are numerous themes, plugins and widgets to help you give your site the look and feel you want. Just as important, building a site in WordPress, including the plugins, has many SEO benefits. Below we have listed just a few of these benefits, including any necessary changes:

Posting and Updating Content is easy to do with WordPress.
By now you’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king”, but having to depend on a webmaster each time you want to post content pages to your website can be expensive. With WordPress you don’t have to outsource the task of adding a new blog post or page to your website. You can handle this task by logging into your WordPress control panel and using the WordPress built-in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. If you can update a Word document then, chances are, you can update a WordPress blog post or page. Adding content to your WordPress site is as easy as typing it, or copying it from an external source, adding a page title and hitting the publish button.

With the WYSIWYG editor you can easily SEO your content by adding keyword-rich page titles, headlines, hyperlinks to other internal pages, H1 or H2 tags, bolding text and more.

WordPress Permalinks – Building SEO-Friendly Page URL’s
The Permalink structure controls how WordPress dynamically creates the URL to your Pages and Posts. Although the default structure isn’t SEO friendly, you can change this default option by logging into WordPress > Settings > Permalinks (see screenshot below).

Here’s an example of the default Permalink structure:

Let’s say you publish a Page named “About Us.” By default, the generated URL would look something like: SampleDomain.com/?p=4.

Notice the “?p=4″ after the main domain name. This part of the URL is called the “Permalink” and is generated dynamically by WordPress right after you hit the publish button. The “?p=4″ looks a bit odd to human visitors and doesn’t do a good job of telling the search engine crawlers what your on-page content is about.

There are many SEO-friendly Permalink structure options available, however we prefer using the custom “/%postname%/” structure.

After making this change, the “About Us” Page would now get an SEO-friendly page URL structure like this: SampleDomain.com/about-us

Not only does this make more sense for human visitors, but it helps improve the relevance of the keyword phrases contained in your Post and/or Page titles.

Creating Unique Title and Description Tags is simple
Unique content on every page is a key factor in SEO – this includes the title tags. A common mistake we see is when all the pages of a site have the same title tag. Usually, it’s the company name. A title tag is what is displayed in the customer’s browser tab and Google uses it to see what keyword is used by the website builder to describe the webpage. By default WordPress uses the same title tag for all pages but there are many plugins, most of them free, that make changing these titles very easy. The one we use is the All in One SEO Pack. After installation, you can go to each page and change the title to anything you want. Ideally it will be an optimized keyword specific for that page.

The SEO pack will also enable you to make edits to the meta description as well. Please note that the description is often what is displayed to the user when they do asearch, right below the headline of the organic listing. The displayed text is limited in length, so make sure your meta description is not too long. Take a look and see what your page descriptions say, you may be surprised.

301 Canonical Redirects are easy to accomplish with Redirection

In April, we discussed how Canonical 301 Redirects can affect search rankings and how to correct them. Unfortunately, the way to correct this issue with most platforms can be tricky. But another handy WordPress plugin, aptly named Redirection, allows you to redirect the page without having to know the code (someone else did that for us). It’s very simple to use. All you have to do is type in the Source (non-canonical) URL, the Target (canonical) URL and click the Add Redirection button.

Because we use WordPress and the previously mentioned plugins, Google indexes all the newly created blog posts to our website within just a few hours. Obviously, the quicker Google indexes your website the better.

Take a few minutes to increase visibility for your business!

Google Places is a significant and free way to advertise your local business. Unfortunately, many business owners are not taking advantage of this valuable tool. We want to help you set up a Google Places listing so you can make the most of this great opportunity!

We previously wrote a couple of articles entitled “Improve Google Places Ranking With These 5 Optimization Tips” and “What Are Google Tags and How Should You Use Them To Enhance Your Local Business Listing”.  These were both intended for people who already had listings and just focused on a few of the features for Google Places.

Download our FREE step-by-step illustrated Google Places SEO guide intended for people who have never set up a local business listing or need additional explanation on some of the specific fields.

Learn more…

Who wants the worst website award?

In our previous post about the Google Panda update, we mentioned that inbound links, while still very important, are not weighted as heavily as a ranking signal as they were previously. What has gained in importance is website quality and user experience. As far as inbound links are concerned, they are still extremely important as a ranking signal but Panda now enables Google to analyze links more carefully. Unnatural linking patterns are now more likely to harm your rankings than before Panda.

Let’s talk about website quality and user experience. Imagine that you’re Google and you want to present only the best sites at the top of the search results. But how do you rate website quality via software? Quality is really something best left to a human being, or many human beings, to gauge.

For several years, Google has provided the public with a dizzying array of “free” tools and applications. These include Google Search (a tool so ubiquitous that it has become a verb), Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar and lately a number of social apps including the Google +1 button.

Google doesn’t charge for these applications. However, we all know that the popularity of Google Search is what drives Google’s core revenue business, namely, keyword sponsorships via AdWords. If everyone switched to a different search engine overnight, Google would lose 2/3 of its AdWords revenue. (The other 1/3 is derived from AdWords clicks on non-search related websites, which Google calls the Display Network.)

Google Search provides important signals to Google regarding user experience, signals that can (and very likely do) impact your website’s search rankings.

Let’s say, for example, that your website ranks in organic (not sponsored) Position 9, near the bottom of the first page, for a particular search. If enough people skip over the 8 listings above yours in order to click your listing, Google will eventually conclude that your listing should be ranked higher, and it will move your site up in the rankings for that keyword because that’s apparently what users want.

Let’s look at another example. Let’s say that your website comes up in organic Position 3 for a particular keyword search. When people click that listing, they land on your site. If a high enough percentage of those clicks return quickly to the search results page (via the Back button) and click on a different listing, eventually Google will get the impression that people don’t like what they are finding on your site. All other things being equal, your rank will deteriorate because the #1 job of Google is to provide users with quality search results. On the other hand, if people click through to your site and don’t return to the same search results page, Google figures they found what they were looking for. If your site outperforms others in this regard for that keyword, you may soon find your website ranking in Position 1 or 2 for that keyword.

Hopefully you noticed something very important about this process of improving your ranking. You did nothing to affect it –other than having a more compelling description in your search results listing, or a better website than your competitors. You didn’t build new links, didn’t stuff keywords in your Meta tags, or do anything like that. Google basically crowd-sourced the human response to your website, compared it to the response on other sites, and adjusted things accordingly.

Google Analytics provides similar feedback to Google because it allows the search giant to compare your website against others in your niche in terms of two key metrics: Bounce Rate and Average Time on Site. Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that view only one page of your site. Average Time on Site is the time visitors spend on your site, minus the final page they visit before they leave the site. (Which is why, if a visitor bounces, their time on site is 0:00 even if they spent 10 minutes staring at the page they landed on.)

Google recently introduced a new social networking application, called the Google +1 button which provides additional user feedback. You can be sure they intend to mine that data for their own benefit.

All of this means that visitor engagement is extremely important to rankings. Your site needs to be visually attractive and provide useful, unique content. It should be easy to navigate. You WANT people to move around from page to page. The copy should be crisp and interesting, the visuals appealing and inviting.

Google has said for years that if you want high rankings, you should simply build a great website. Now, more than ever before, they have the means to enforce that recommendation.

Where did my website go?

Over the past couple of years, there’s been a sharp increase in complaints about poor quality websites showing up at the top of Google’s search results. In response, Google issued a software update, known as Panda, on February 23, 2011. The fundamental goal of the Panda Update was to downgrade the rank of websites that didn’t offer users unique, valuable information. One website that was mentioned in this regard was eHow.com, which offers many thousands of how-to guides, and has sometimes been referred to as an example of a “content farm.”

Panda had a powerful effect, banishing many formerly top-ranking sites to second-class status and elevating other, previously lesser known sites, to the top of the rankings. It didn’t have as significant an impact on eHow as Google wanted, so a subsequent release of Panda was made in April.

Panda is the latest escalation in the war between Google, which wants to rank websites by quality and usefulness, and people who want their website to appear at the top of Google’s search results for certain keywords whether they deserve to or not.

Panda has significantly changed the rules of Search Engine Optimization. Search is the crown jewel of Google’s empire, and quality search results was what put Google into the position they’re in today. They could not afford to allow their search results to be egregiously manipulated.

Google rose to prominence because of their ranking algorithm, which has relied heavily since the beginning on inbound links to indicate which websites should be given more prominence than others. The more sites linking to yours, all other things being equal, the higher your site would rank for keywords that appear on its pages. Sometimes links alone were enough. There’s an old parlor trick where you type the phrase “click here” into Google. The #1 ranking site that comes up is the download site for Adobe Reader even though the words “click here” don’t appear anywhere on the page. Presumably, that’s because so many sites are linking to that page with a hyperlink using the words “click here” as anchor text, telling their viewers how to get the Adobe reader software.

Google has acknowledged in the past that there are over 200 factors in its ranking algorithm. Obviously, these factors carry different weights. With the Panda update, Google has shifted some of the weighting away from inbound links, in favor of website content and user behavior. Make no mistake. Inbound links are still very important. They’re just a little less important than they used to be.

In the next article, we’ll tell you more about what this means and what you should do if you care about how your target keywords rank in Google. In the meantime, you would be wise to focus your attention on making your website content as unique, useful, and engaging as you possibly can.

Continue reading The Google Panda Update and What You Should Do About It Now – Part 2

Personal Search Results

Last week, someone emailed me a link to a YouTube video that was recorded at a TED conference. In it, Eli Pariser makes a presentation about “Filter Bubbles” in which he demonstrates how our online behavior causes information providers to “filter” what we’re shown, with the result that we tend to see and hear only what they perceive we want to see and hear. He presents a compelling case and it’s worth the investment of nine minutes to watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s

Eli, you may recall, is the former executive director of MoveOn.org, which means that I probably don’t share most of his political views, though I do understand his concern about the rapid growth of personalized news search results. However, I’m not so worried about personalized advertising and search results.

Recently, Time Magazine started showing up in my mailbox each week, which was puzzling because I knew I hadn’t subscribed. Then came Rolling Stone. Nobody has claimed credit, although I’ve made some discreet inquiries to several acquaintances and friends to try to identify my anonymous benefactor.

My hypothesis is that someone who knows me is trying to burst a self-imposed Filter Bubble, which admittedly has been a fairly steady diet of Fox News and National Review, although I also confess to being a regular, long-time listener of NPR. And you know what? I’m reading Time and Rolling Stone and finding them interesting. I don’t always agree with what they say. In fact, I sometimes vehemently disagree. But overall, I think it’s beneficial to examine both sides of an issue before drawing one’s own conclusions. If Time and Rolling Stone make me a more well-rounded individual, then I’m all for it. I may draw the line at MoveOn.org though.

So what does all of this have to do with search engine optimization? SEO has always been about showing up at the top of the Google, Bing and Yahoo Search Engine Results Pages for keywords that might bring you customers or, at least, a receptive audience. But whose search results are we talking about? If everyone sees a different SERP, then what value is there in monthly Ranking Reports to measure the progress of your SEO efforts?

For the time being, we can still find ways to see relatively unfiltered search results. At Market Vantage, we have access to anonymous proxies so that when we want to do research, we can pop up with a different location and IP address. I use Firefox for my daily activities that require logins, like Facebook, Gmail, and managing Pay-Per-Click accounts. In addition, I’ve configured Internet Explorer in such a way that it deletes all cookies, history, logins, etc. each time it exits. I use IE primarily for spot-checking keyword results on Google or Bing.

Which brings up another question. How many searches for a keyword are motivated by someone who is seeking information or hoping to buy something, versus checking their website’s search position for that keyword? Rank checking surely constitutes a significant number of searches, which pollutes the search frequency data presented by the tools we use for keyword research.

At the end of the day, the ultimate effectiveness of your SEO effort should be gauged, to the degree that it can be, by its impact on your organization’s bottom line. Meanwhile, we should all be on our guard about the invisible Internet filter that’s trying to put each of us into our own, happy little bubble.  Whatever your personal beliefs, we can probably all benefit from a dose of Rolling Stone or National Review from time to time.

Would you build your house with a Faulty foundation?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a call that went something like this: “Hi, we just had our website completely redesigned and now that it’s live, we’d like the site to get more traffic from the search engines. Can you help?”

Of course we can help. But frankly, the correct answer is, “I wish you’d talked to me before you launched the new site.”

It’s a fact that most sites suffer a drop in traffic right after a re-build. Why? Most sites have search rank and traffic for at least SOME non-branded keywords before the rebuild. What often happens next is that they still show up in the same place in the organic search results for a while, but anyone clicking on the listing will land on a 404 error – Page Not Found because the content that Google was pointing to is now located at a new URL which Google doesn’t know about yet.

To Google, providing quality search results is like religion. A search result that points to a 404 page is heresy. If Google finds the associated content in its new location, and if you’re lucky, they will eventually link to the new page. Otherwise, your position for that keyword will simply disappear from the search results and the traffic you used to get for that keyword will evaporate.

Having search engine rank for non-branded keywords is like having equity in your home. It adds enormous value to your website, above and beyond the look and feel of your site. It needs to be protected. There are steps you can take to ensure an orderly transition, preserve your search rank equity, and ultimately help your site get more traffic than before, but you need to plan ahead and be proactive.

A properly optimized website is reflected in the structure of the site, just as a properly designed house has a solid foundation. If you build a house and then discover the foundation is inadequate, you’ve got an expensive problem to fix. It would have been much easier and cheaper to get the foundation right BEFORE building the house.

Similarly, doing keyword research prior to a website rebuild and defining placements for your target keywords on the new site before it launches is easier (and costs less) than trying to retrofit. Moreover, you should always take stock of the keywords that are bringing traffic to your site before rebuilding, and decide which ones you want to keep and which to replace.

Generally, a website rebuild will trigger a rewrite of at least some of the copy. Having your keyword research handy while writing new copy lets you weave those keywords into the copy in a natural, professional way. Your new website will probably introduce new filenames (URLs) for internal pages. These present a wonderful opportunity to apply your keywords, right in the URL names. It’s much easier and more effective to do this before the site launches, than to change the URLs after.

If you are designing a new home, it is easier and cheaper to move walls on the floor plans than it is once they have been built. Similarly, you can save a lot of trouble and money down the road if you include SEO in the website rebuild process from the start.